Adventure Journalism in the Gilded Age

Book excerpt: These new essays tell the stories of daring reporters, male and female, sent out by their publishers not to capture the news but to make the news--indeed to achieve star billing--and to capitalize on the Gilded Age public's craze for real-life adventures into the exotic and unknown. They examine the adventure journalism genre through the work of iconic writers such as Mark Twain and Nellie Bly, as well as lesser-known journalistic masters such as Thomas Knox and Eliza Scidmore, who took to the rivers and oceans, mineshafts and mountains, rails and trails of the late nineteenth century, shaping Americans' perceptions of the world and of themselves.